As a Louisiana economist, LorenScott has been following the state’soil and gas industry for more thanfour decades.
What will it take for Louisiana to transition to the new energy economy as the nation attempts to move away from fossil fuels and toward a low-carbon future?
This was the question at the heart of a recent panel, which featured Scott Angelle, former director of the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement (BSEE) under former President Donald Trump, and Louisiana economist Loren Scott.
Angelle, who has also served as secretary of the Louisiana Department of Natural Resources, stressed the importance of acknowledging the inevitability of the energy transition regardless of where one stands politically concerning climate change.
"In the energy sector, like in life, things change fast," he said. "Every generation has faced these challenges, and a challenge of our generation is climate change. I am not here to persuade you whether or not climate change is real; I am here to tell you that much of the world believes it is real, and governments are taking actions in response to it. Louisiana has a responsibility and a duty to be responsive to those things."
According to Angelle, substituting foreign- sourced petroleum production with more, not less, U.S. offshore energy is key to achieving the goals of the Paris Agreement while also saving the jobs of American energy workers and strengthening the U.S.'s domestic economy and national security.
Angelle cited a few statistics to articulate what this means for Louisiana's energy economy: 15 percent of U.S. oil production and 98 percent of all offshore oil produced in the U.S. comes from the Gulf of Mexico, and 92 percent of that offshore output comes from deep-water production - an area with a small environmental footprint.
"The deep-water Gulf of Mexico has a very small footprint," Angelle said. "There are 68 production facilities, representing only 4 percent of the production facilities in the Gulf, that are responsible for 92 percent of the production. We need to take advantage of that."
Furthermore, emissions from Gulf of Mexico oil production are far less intense than emissions from foreign production, Angelle said. Thus, ramping up deep-water Gulf of Mexico production and becoming less reliant on foreign sources will not only help the U.S. achieve its climate goals, but also greatly strengthen Louisiana's economy.
Scott agreed with Angelle that "a lot of changes are taking place" in Louisiana's economy due to the energy transition. His biggest worries going forward stem from statements made by Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland, who has proposed a ban on drilling in public waters.
"A great deal of our oil production comes from the Gulf of Mexico, which is federal land," Scott said. "This transition is not going to hit all states the same. States like Utah, Arizona or Iowa won't be very impacted, but Louisiana is one of the states in which the transition is going to be very serious.
"This is an adjustment that both state and local governments are going to have to make if our oil and gas industry goes away. The transition is going to be quite a revolution, but I do think it's going to happen much more slowly than we may anticipate."
"We have to be reactive," Angelle added. "As the wind blows in different directions, we need to adjust ourselves. Change does not mean death; it actually means survival."
